Ambushed by a Poem

I am a sucker for poetry. I love it when it crops up unexpectedly. The Nationwide Building Society captured my heart when it included poems in advertisements on the TV and took out full page spreads in the daily newspapers. OK, they never captured my heart enough for me to take out a mortgage with them, so I suppose that in a sense the advertisements didn’t work, but I liked it. It was a cut above the smiling pictures of pretty people that other banks and building societies use. They were probably not the first people to use poems but it seems poems pop up everywhere, if you know how to recognise them as poems.

I have been settling down to watch a new Marvel series on one of the hundreds of programmes I have access to through a million streaming TV channels. I’d like to say that there is never a time when ‘there’s nothing to watch on TV but millions of channels does not always mean there is anything that catches my interest.

‘Secret Invasion’ is my husband’s choice. I am not up to date with all the Marvel characters and what superpowers they have or their incognito names, costumes or past history. Nick Fury falls into that category of the unknown. His previous adventures are hinted at. I can see in my mind’s eye, the Nick fury fans nodding heads and reliving important events, but I am not one of them.

There is a scene in episode 4 where Priscilla and Nick meet and talk poetry written by Raymond Carver. I have come across him before in my creative writing studies. Short stories. I seem to remember having to choose a writer from a selection and tasked with writing a story in the writer’s style. Priscilla reads a four-line poem called Late Fragment.

And did you get what

you wanted from this life, even so?

I did.

And what did you want?

To call myself beloved, to feel myself

beloved on the earth.

It must be the saddest thing in the whole world to answer that opening question with the words ‘I did not’. And yet the answer ‘I did’ did not come easily or swiftly to my mind. Part of the problem might be in not knowing what it is I want from life and wondering whether I have got was what I wanted. I am sure I am not alone in that. Another part of the problem is that my life is perhaps two thirds through. I am not lived out yet.

What we want from life is always changing, I think. When I was very young, I wanted blue eyes. I never got them, of course. Today I would settle for seeing clearly and being able to read a number plate from 25 metres and maybe reclaiming a driving licence. Blue eyes is not the priority it once was.

I was weaned reading-wise on Mills and Boons romances so what I wanted was that tall dark handsome stranger, that look across a crowded room and a heaving bosom when our eyes met. It didn’t happen that way and I would have to say that my husband doesn’t meet the Mills and Boons criteria, but he ticks all my boxes.

‘And what do you want?’ Is that not a battleground? So many images abound telling us what we need to make our lives complete, it is easy to get swallowed up in wanting things that really don’t complete us. I decided a while back not to defriend someone on Facebook but to train myself not to read what was posted. It was not negative splurge. Milestones a baby was reaching was being documented with joy. Seeing the pictures and reading the comments posted made me yearn for something I didn’t have and couldn’t have – children. It was like picking at a scab I thought had healed over long ago. It seems not. I did want children and put myself and my husband through cycles of IVF treatment. Maybe if I had have held out for the Mills and Boons man…but I adore my husband.

To know that I am loved – that is worth holding out for.

I don’t rate myself as particularly beautiful, but because my husband says I am, I am made beautiful. The last lines of a poem I wrote comes to mind. It was prompted by Fibonacci’s golden ratio and what makes a person beautiful.

my face doesn’t meet his (Fibonacci’s) criteria.

I flout the formula,

disguising my imperfections with a fringe.

I know that I am loved,

not meanly or with small doses of affection. I’m

loved with extravagance, nothing held in reserve, thus

I am made beautiful - Fibonacci is overruled.

We all need to know ourselves loved, but it really matters who does the loving and how. Another poem I wrote was based on the Westminster Confession answering the question ‘What Is God’.

A verse on God as love went as follows –

He is love

Always

Laid down life

For his friends

A friend didn’t like the verse because it was too narrow in its focus. What about the ‘not friends’? Did Jesus not lay down His life for those too, for all people whether they became His friends or not. So I rewrote the lines…

He is love

Always

Without measure

Surpassing all dimensions

This is how I know I am loved – always, without measure and surpassing all dimensions.

And you are too…